Science Meets Superstition as Nervous Pluto Team Waits

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LAUREL, Md. -- As NASA's New Horizons team members wait in
anticipation for the spacecraft to check in with them tonight
(July 14) after its historic flyby of Pluto, they'll be making
sure not to jinx the mission.

New Horizons zoomed within 7,800 miles (12,500 kilometers) of
Pluto at 7:49 a.m. EDT (1149 GMT) today, hopefully collecting the
first up-close images and other data about the dwarf planet
system. But the spacecraft's handlers won't know how things went
until they get a status update from the probe, a report that is
expected to come in at about 9 p.m. EDT tonight (0100 GMT
Wednesday).

"It is science, but we are superstitious," New Horizons mission
operations manager Alice Bowman, of the Johns Hopkins University
Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, said during
a news conference Sunday (July 12). [ New
Horizons' Epic Pluto Flyby: Complete Coverage ]

So team members avoid talking about the things they fear most —
and feel the need to knock on wood if someone slips up and
mentions a
potential problem.

About a year after New Horizons' January 2006 launch, Bowman made
such a comment and then said, "Knock on wood," said mission
principal investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research
Institute in Colorado.

Stern looked around and realized that the mission control center
at APL had no wood to knock on. He went out and bought several
small wooden cutting boards to put around mission control, then
branded them with New Horizons stickers.

Another tradition has to do with the many hibernation periods New
Horizons endured. As part of the push to keep costs down, the
spacecraft's guidance and control systems were shut off multiple
times over its 3-billion-mile (4.8 billion km) journey to Pluto.

While some hibernation periods lasted just a few weeks, the probe
slept for a whopping 262 days back in 2008. New Horizons is able
to sleep for 365 consecutive days, a full Earth year.

For the first hibernation, Bowman brought a small stuffed bear
into mission control. Soon the bear had a small pillow and
blanket. Bowman made it a yellow nightcap with a blue ball.

"When it was time to wake up, I went in, and it had a green party
hat," Bowman said.

Colored streamers were added over the next couple of weeks.

The hibernation bear became a tradition. Each time New Horizons
shut down, the bear would be laid down and covered up.

In December 2014, New Horizons had its
final wake-up call before today's Pluto flyby. The bear now
sits, alert, with a party hat on its head.

"He'll be sitting there for a long time, until we've got the data
down," Bowman said.